World War II was nearly over when Irene Weiss and her family were taken to Auschwitz.

It was 1944, and she was only 13 years old. Most European Jews had been killed or were in other concentration camps, so the Nazis had turned their attention to the last major Jewish population in Western Europe: the Hungarian Jews.

The next eight months changed her life. But as traumatic as the experience was for her, Irene Weiss has told her story many times in the years since, including at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she volunteers.

She told it once again on Sunday, Oct. 29, at the Chabad Lubavitch Center for Jewish Life in Columbia.

“This may be one of the last times she’s going to speak,” said Lesley Weiss, Irene Weiss’ daughter. Irene Weiss is nearly 93 and has been winding down the amount of speaking engagements she takes on as she ages. “As you can imagine, it’s been difficult,” Lesley Weiss added.

Over the course of an hour, Irene Weiss described an “outline” of the experiences she had in Auschwitz as a prisoner. She noted that “to tell the whole story would take days and days … but I was a witness to something that needs to be remembered.”

While the event was organized prior to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Rabbi Yanky Baron, director of Chabad of Ellicott City, said that Irene Weiss’ story is now more important than ever during a time of heightened antisemitism.

“It’s a pivotal moment in history, where we have a choice to say ‘never again,’” Baron said.

Irene Weiss and her family lived in Hungary, where her father ran a small lumber yard and her mother took care of things at home. Life first began to change for her family in 1939, when Hungary joined the Nazi alliance with Germany and began to institute the restrictive Nuremberg Laws. These defined Jewish people, along with Romani and Black people, as non-Aryan races and required Jews to wear yellow stars denoting their Jewish identity.

While Hungary’s involvement in the Nazi alliance delayed the imprisonment of many Hungarian Jews, they did not escape the war unscathed.

“The war was almost over, but the Final Solution, as the Germans called it, was proceeding with speed and efficiency,” Irene Weiss said. “It was the spring of 1944, the last day of Passover, when officials announced that all the Jewish people had to leave our town.”

One memory that stuck with her was that, even though it was still Passover, her mother broke the holiday’s rules by baking bread so her family would have food to eat.

After spending a month at an overcrowded brick factory, Irene Weiss and her family were sent to Auschwitz by train. Once they arrived, they were separated. Because a guard thought she was older than she was, she was sent off with her older sister, Serena. She would never see her father and older brother again, and she would not see her mother and younger siblings again until she identified them in a photo taken by an SS officer of prisoners waiting to be sent to the gas chambers.

“My family had tried so hard to stay together. We were now completely torn apart,” she said. “The trauma of having our family torn apart has never left me.”

Irene Weiss recalled another experience of asking other prisoners living in the barracks when she and her sister would be able to see their family again.

“A woman pointed to the smoke rising from one of the chimneys, and said ‘that will be your family,’” she said.

Eight months passed. When the Russian army approached the camp, the prisoners had a glimmer of hope that they would be liberated — but this optimism was short-lived, as the Germans evacuated Auschwitz and took the prisoners on a death march to the much smaller Ravensbrück concentration camp.

By the time the camp was liberated, the only members of Irene Weiss’s family who had survived were herself, her sister and their maternal aunt Rose. Though they had been imprisoned for less than a year, it was difficult for them to adjust to the outside world again.

“I stopped and stared when I saw children in a nearby town,” Irene Weiss said. “I had not seen children in over a year. In the world I had come from, children were condemned to death.”

Irene Weiss admitted that she thought antisemitism would be “over” and no longer something Jewish people had to contend with after the Holocaust ended. Things did not work out as well as she hoped, though, which is why she still finds it important to share her story as much as she can.

“I will never stop feeling grateful that I’m Jewish,” she said. “I never want to be anything else. Our people are great and have always been great. We never deserved this. I think we can show the world how to be humane.”